Influential Neighbors

By

Melik Kaylan

April 30, 2012 5:56 p.m. ET

New York

As the world shrinks, one is increasingly grateful for glimpses of cultures, farflung in time or place, that stir up one's inner Tintin or Conan Doyle with a sense of irreducible mystery. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) seems dedicated to bringing us just such glimpses—in the most scholarly way, of course, it being a branch of New York University. The Institute's whimsically old-world setting accentuates the feeling of discovery. You walk into a repurposed townhouse—externally discreet, internally grand—just off upper Fifth Avenue and find a wholly unimaginable experience, an encounter, say, with 3000 B.C. Nubia or with Danube Valley relics from 5000 B.C. (two shows from recent years). The current show, "Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art and Culture of Kazakhstan," couldn't be more splendidly esoteric, focusing as it does on that most perennially opaque of the earth's remote regions, the vast steppe-lands of Eurasia.

Nomads and Networks: The Ancient Art

And Culture

Of Kazakhstan

Institute for the Study

Of the Ancient World

Through June 3

ENLARGE

The Central State Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Almaty

You might think the subject too esoteric. This is precisely what the world thought at several hinge-points in history when out of those hinterlands erupted the Scythians, the Magyars, Attila, Genghis Khan, Kubla Khan, Tamerlane and the like. The artifacts on view come from four separate Kazakh museums but originate from digs and burial mounds that date back to the first millennium B.C. These are the embryonic shoots of a culture that eventually and repeatedly overwhelmed the civilized world. I say "civilized" guardedly. These days nobody uses such terms except to controvert them—and, indeed, the curators are at pains to demonstrate that the nomad horse culture of the steppe was anything but primitive. It achieved a kind of perfection, lasted for millennia, and endures in some version in many rural parts of Kazakhstan today.

This is a smallish exhibition of some 250 objects in two rooms, most being shown in the U.S. for the first time. Chief curator Jennifer Chi visited Kazakhstan's museums first and evolved a theme for making a selection. Focusing on the interaction between cultures, as ISAW's mission statement requires, she set out to show the internal contact between regional steppe tribes, and their broader interaction with renowned sedentary cultures on the fringes, such as the Persian and Chinese. And so the viewer looks at horse-and-rider-related artifacts in various permutations, ornaments for horse tack, for saddle cloth, for bridles and browbands and throat bits. Finely worked, broochlike gold plaques from the eighth century B.C. surprise us—as they're meant to—that nomadic horsemen could create handiwork of that quality. Most of the motifs depict actual or mythological animals, such as ibex and elk with stylized antlers, griffins, sphinxes and the like.

Now and again, the eye is drawn to an exquisite object of utterly superior artistry, and one finds that it probably came from a nearby sedentary civilization. The 2,200-year-old gold Kargaly diadem found near Almaty is a case in point. Its intricate arabesques seem rooted in the delicate gold tracery of Han Chinese workshops. We know this because we have seen comparable things before in various museums. The bronze cauldrons could be Urartian or, for that matter, Chinese. The bronze incense trays show Achaemenid or Persian motifs. In fact, nothing here strikes one as utterly unprecedented; the show is not about the objects qua objects. Rather, they offer clues to a pivotal phase in our collective history that remains stubbornly crepuscular—a phase worth illuminating when you consider the impact it ultimately had on the world.

We come away not wholly enlightened but instead further intrigued because of a fundamental obstacle: This was not a culture that knew how to write. All the more astonishing that it ultimately overwhelmed highly literate cultures halfway across the globe. We do have classical and Chinese sources. Herodotus speaks of the Scythians at some length. But the digs and burial mounds, some entirely for sacrificed horses, and cliff-carvings and artifacts are the only direct communication, as it were, from the culture itself. What can we garner from such distant semiotic blips?

According to Sören Stark, ISAW's expert on Altaic or Turco-Mongolian matters, we can begin by classifying the nomad culture as sui generis—not hunter-gatherers, sedentary urbanites, farmers nor seagoing folk. Their horse-borne mobility allowed them to range widely, but real expansion began around 1000 B.C. with the development of mounted archery. "The show reveals an early moment of globalization with cross-cultural influences, the early Silk Road perhaps," Mr. Stark says. "The tribes were a little cosmopolitan, perhaps not as monocultural or monoethnic as the popular perception goes. In fact, over time, it seems that the elites broke tribal limits and gathered retinues from outside." He is reluctant to infer too much from the evidence, but he feels that "the recurrent animal motifs, purely animal with no humans in the picture," suggest a religious cosmology of animal worship. Shamanism? Perhaps. Central Asia, after all, became the source of a shamanism or mysticism that eventually found its way to the West via such lionized 20th-century gurus as George Gurdjieff and Peter Ouspensky.

And there's the tantalizing rub—the show, perforce, stops short of so many fertile extrapolations. Do the animal motifs reveal any connection to American-Indian cultures? The linguistic links have long been mooted, and the genetic ones linking all the way to Uzbekistan are now fully proved. Did Altaic or Mongolian tribes import ancient shamanism to the Americas or did Amerindians evolve their own separately? Did the Navajos bring their textile skills from Asia? Mr. Stark believes that chariots were first invented on the steppes. What other ideas originated there? The ISAW show opens a door-crack onto a vast swath of as-yet-undiscovered world history. One hopes others aplenty follow through on it.

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